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Public opinion and government policy in Britain: A case of congruence, amplification or dampening?
Abstract
This article examines postwar government policy in Britain, as reflected in annual budget speeches. Like previous research, it aims to content-analyse these speeches to derive estimates of actual, as opposed to intended, government policy stances. Unlike previous research, it also aims to capture and measure the gap between intentions (as represented in electoral manifestos) and actual policy. This gap cannot be assessed from the final output of the Wordscores content analysis programme (in either the original version or the Martin-Vanberg variation), but it can be teased out of the raw output. This teasing-out process reveals the gap to be very small: there is no evidence that British governments either moderate or amplify their left-right stances when in office. This new measurement of government position is then used to cast further light on policy representation in Britain. The findings show that policy positions respond significantly to changes in public opinion as well as to electoral turnover, but do not exhibit or even approach the ideological congruence anticipated by the ‘median mandate’ interpretation of representative democracy.
... One of the key aspects of democratic nations, and central to the purpose of political representation, is the assumption that public policies should correspond to a close degree with public interests (Arnold & Franklin, 2012;Warwick, 2015;Balatonyi, et al. 2022). Prior work stresses that an alignment between public interests and policies can provide momentum to make policy implementation much more effective, as the public gets the policies they prefer (Arnold & Franklin, 2012;Carattini et al., 2018;Bastida et al., 2019). ...
... Prior work stresses that an alignment between public interests and policies can provide momentum to make policy implementation much more effective, as the public gets the policies they prefer (Arnold & Franklin, 2012;Carattini et al., 2018;Bastida et al., 2019). Conversely, a lack of congruence between public interests and policies can lead to low policy acceptance and constrain the success of policy implementation (Warwick, 2015;Carattini et al., 2018). The level of alignment between the public and climate policies can be characterized through public-policy congruence approaches (Schlosberg et al., 2017;Repo et al., 2018;Kinnunen, 2021). ...
This study examines the extent of congruence across the issue of climate change between households and climate policies, based on a case study in Nuevo León, Mexico. We used thematic analysis to examine responses from a household survey and classify perceptions of climate change, which resulted in seven main themes. We then reviewed how the themes are used in selected climate policies to make a comparison between them and household perceptions. We found climate policy concerns focused on mitigating greenhouse gases, preparing for extreme weather events, and reducing impacts that affect economic development in Nuevo León and Mexico. By contrast, respondents showed a wider range of concerns and are especially worried about current issues in their homes and everyday lives. As households have an important role to play in addressing climate change, we argue that a stronger congruence between household perceptions and climate policies could make policies more approachable for households, and thus have a positive impact on policy implementation.
... This is particularly important if there exists a lack of congruence, as it seems in our analysis, between citizen perspectives and public policy. If the theme of circular economy were to become politicized amongst the wider public, policies which have been formulated for it could be challenged, and people act as agents for new developments (Warwick 2015;Cazabat 2016). Congruence would provide momentum for achieving policy goals while a lack of it could signal either needs to revise policy programs or attempts by governments to implement unpopular programs (Achen and Bartels 2016;Clawson and Oxley 2013). ...
... Particular attention has been given to the potential lack of congruence between the two, because this is likely to have an impact on the successes of the policies. Congruence provides acceptance and momentum for policy while a lack of it could provide a challenge (Warwick 2015). There is a lack of empirical and consumer-centred studies on circular economy (see Murray et al. 2015;Hobson and Lynch 2016). ...
The concept of circular economy has become a catchphrase for describing redesign of economies and industries towards better sustainability. The consideration of consumers holds a prominent role in the concept, yet consumers‟ concerns and hopes are not well accounted for. This article takes a forward-looking approach to the relationship between consumers and policies on circular economy. It analyses an extensive and systematically collected corpus of European citizen visions on desirable and sustainable futures from this perspective, and compares the outcomes to newly adopted circular economy policies in Europe. The article argues that European policies on circular economy should increasingly connect to energy and climate issues as well as social topics, if they are to build congruence between citizen and policy understandings, and thereby raise public acceptance for the concept.
Keywords
circular economy, policy congruence, consumers, citizen visions, sustainability, topic modelling
... Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the basic left-right orientation of the electorate does not shift as readily as the policy orientations of successive governments. I am speaking here not just of my own work based on various public opinion surveys (Warwick 2010(Warwick , 2011(Warwick , 2012(Warwick , 2015, but also of the substantial evidence amassed from other sources in support of the Soroka and Wlezien's (2010) thermostatic model, which sees governments overshooting public opinion first to one side, then to the other, over the course of time. ...
... Empirically, this argument presents a challenge because it is inherently difficult to prove or disprove: While intended policy can be inferred from party positions, measuring the actual left-right party stances of governments is a much more thorny issue. There is some evidence that overshooting occurs even when government policy is not measured from intentions (Soroka and Wlezien 2010;Warwick 2015), but much more would be needed to establish the case conclusively. ...
In response to my characterization of ideological congruence as an "illusion," Powell (this issue) demonstrates that incongruence, while common, tends to be only moderate in most cases, a conclusion with which I agree. Nevertheless, I argue that the concept of ideological congruence is misleading when applied as Powell does, and problematic, if not meaningless, when applied in the alternative ways proposed by Best, Budge, and McDonald. For these reasons, the term continues to obscure more than it reveals.
... While one should be careful in comparing dierent types of political texts, in this case manifestos and parliamentary speech, Warwick (2014) suggests that this actually does provide reasonable estimates of party positions. The main problem the researcher is presented with when applying Wordscores is that estimates of virgin texts`shrink' towards the mean because of common words that are plentiful in all texts analysed (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2003, 316). ...
... Benoit and Garry (LBG) transformation, which assumes that the standard deviation of virgin and reference texts is equal, and the Martin and Vanberg (MV) transformation which assumes that the`shrinkage' is equal for reference texts and virgin texts (Martin and Vanberg, 2007;Warwick, 2014). The latter assumption is problematic when using dierent types of texts: when using manifestos as reference texts, shrinkage was found to be smaller in manifestos than in parliamentary debates, most likely because manifesto Source data for texts were obtained from the following sources. ...
What is the effect of opinion polls on mandate fulfilment? This paper studies
political parties' policy congruence between their pre-electoral manifesto and parliamentary speech. The expectation is that congruence depends on parties' performance in recent opinion polls, conditional on a party being in government or in opposition. The paper provides empirical evidence from Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (1997-2015). Based on Wordscores estimates of parties' pre- and post-electoral position, some support is found for the hypothesis that government parties show increased congruence the more their opinion poll support changes, while opposition parties show (marginally) decreased congruence.
... Second, research consistently shows that public opinion is a key factor in enacting public policies (Barry et al. 2016;Baumgartner and Jones 2015;Baumgartner and Mahoney 2005;Burstein 2003;Warwick 2015). Thus, it is important to understand who the public blames for this crisis and who is responsible for fixing the problem. ...
The opioid crisis has claimed more than a half-million deaths over the past two decades and is one of the leading causes of injury deaths in the United States. The current study examines: 1) public opinion on the severity of the opioid crisis in terms of lives lost compared to other fatal social events, 2) opinions on who has been most affected by the opioid crisis, and the accuracy of these perceptions, 3) opinions on who is responsible or “to blame” for the crisis and who should fix it and 4) the individual and contextual characteristics that are related to these perceptions. Using data from an October 2019 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey, the Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Census, we find that the public severely underestimates the death toll of the opioid crisis compared to other fatal events. We also find that public perception of who and where have been most affected is fairly accurate, and such views are highly consistent across different locations, contexts, and sociodemographic characteristics of places and respondents. Additionally, we find that the public collectively views pharmaceutical companies and doctors as responsible for contributing to and fixing the opioid overdose crisis.
... Yet, we argue that the compatibility of reference and virgin texts of a different nature should not be ruled out a priori in Wordscores analyses. Indeed, researchers have obtained convincing results with Wordscores using formal written texts to analyze informal written texts (Toff and Kim 2013) or formal spoken texts (Weinberg 2010;Warwick 2015). Whether the results generated by Wordscores using academic publications and interview transcripts are valid is therefore an empirical question. ...
Automated content analysis methods treat “text as data” and can therefore analyze efficiently large qualitative databases. Yet, despite their potential, these methods are rarely used to supplement qualitative analysis in small-N designs. We address this gap by replicating the qualitative findings of a case study of a social policy reform using automated content analysis. To characterize the ideology of this reform, we reanalyze the same interview data with Wordscores, using academic publications as reference texts. As expected, the reform’s ideology is center/center-right, a result that we validate using content, convergent and discriminant strategies. The validation evidence suggests not only that the ideological positioning of the policy reform is credible, but also that Wordscores’ scope of application is greater than expected.
... From a similar perspective, the policy component of SWD is highlighted in the pioneering study of Anderson and Guillory (1997) who show that election winners in majoritarian democracies enjoy a surplus in SWD when compared to winners in consensual democracies. This surplus is likely to be policy-driven as the link between winning in elections and getting one's preferred policy results is more direct in majoritarian democracies (e.g., Warwick 2015). ...
In the first comparative study of multidimensional government-citizen policy congruence, this article shows that citizens are less satisfied with democracy when their views differ from that of the government on policy dimensions beyond the general left-right axis. Satisfaction is reduced by a government that deviates on European integration and redistribution and partly also on social lifestyle, immigration and environmental protection. Furthermore, this analysis identifies the level of political interest as central moderator of this relationship. Satisfaction of citizens with stronger interest in politics suffers more when there is a politically distant government. Combining data from the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and two waves of the European Social Survey, the analysis builds on information on citizen-government policy congruence of some 45,000 citizens and 31 governments in 15 Western and Central Eastern European countries. The article brings a multidimensional perspective to the study of policy congruence between citizens and governments in a time when the preference structure of parties and citizens has become increasingly complex.
Using survey data collected in China's 4 centrally administered municipalities and 15 sub-provincial cities, this study examined the public's perceptions of government policy information. The awareness of central and local Government Annual Reports (GARs) were found to correspond to a “Hierarchical Phenomenon” in the public's perceptions of policy signals. It also reflected a pattern of political trust. Generally speaking, Chinese citizens gave priority to policy signals from the central government compared to those from local governments. The features of policy information flow within governments are believed to play a part in this process. However, the number of information channels a citizen had access to significantly affected the gap in policy awareness between central and local GARs. Furthermore, the more information channels the respondents used, the narrower this gap was.
Using data from a questionnaire survey of residents in 15 sub-provincial cities and 4 provincial-level municipalities in China, this paper presents an analysis of the political communication efficiency of the government annual report (GAR). The study had three findings. First, GARs’ relevance, reliability, and clarity impacted its communication efficiency; but, some demographic characteristics like gender, profession, age, and education, also had effects on efficiency. Second, political embeddedness and psychological distance also affected GARs’ communication efficiency; for example, public servants and regular viewers of CCTV news had higher awareness of GARs. Finally, accessibility was a factor of policy communication efficiency for GARs. Through a combination of using the indirect channels found in the private sector, and further developing its own direct channels like government websites, China's governments can greatly improve their efficiency of policy communication.
According to spatial theories of voting, voters choose parties that are ideologically close to themselves. A rich literature confirms the presence of a close connection between the positions of voters and parties, but findings from cross-sectional analyses of spatial voting might be driven by endogeneity biases. We argue that for investigating the impact of ideological distance on the vote, spatial theories of voting should be tested dynamically. Taking a Downsian perspective on voting behaviour, we assume that changes in parties’ ideological positions should cause voters to switch parties from one election to another. In doing so, we also contribute to work on responsiveness to political parties. For testing the role of spatial voting dynamically, we make use of election panel surveys in four established democracies: Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden. The results presented in this article suggest that parties’ ideological shifts may indeed cause voters to switch parties, in particular when the party closest to them changes positions, but that the overall impact remains limited.
Virginia, much like other states, has experienced unprecedented rates of heroin and prescription opioid abuse, overdoses, and deaths. Given the wide range of competing voices concerning drug policy and the complicated situation of the contemporary opioid epidemic, this study examines whether public opinion is reflected in public policy toward illicit involvement with opioids. The 2016 Commonwealth Public Policy Survey, a statewide representative sample of 1,000 Virginia residents, found that Virginians are supportive of treatment over arrest for heroin and prescription pill abusers and factors such as race, education, and political affiliation are predictive of support for treatment over arrest. More importantly, the results of this poll converge with legislative policies of the 2017 General Assembly, supporting the notion that public support can have an influence on the policymaking process. Policy implications are discussed.
In most cases, professional sport stadiums are financed through a mix of public and private investment. The amount of public subsidy allocated for a stadium can vary greatly by project, as can the role of citizens in deciding such matters. With respect to public-stadium financing, research has focused chiefly on citizen participation through direct democracy (e.g. referendums and initiatives). However, the vast majority of stadium projects across North American professional sport receive public financing without any form of citizen vote. Cases of the so-called no-vote subsidy may be problematic to citizens, especially if public policy does not correspond to the public will, a fundamental principle of a democratic system of governance. Given the lack of research in this area, the purpose of this study was to develop a scale that measured citizens’ attitudes towards and consequences of a no-vote stadium subsidy. In this article, we introduce the Proxy Referendum on Public Stadium Appropriation (PROPSA), a 26-item instrument designed to measure 7 constructs: support of financing plan, perceived stadium impact, trust in civically paternalistic leadership, team attendance intentions, congruence with democratic norms, political apathy, and voting intentions. Three associated propositions are introduced, and the scale is tested using a sample of 401 voters registered in a county impacted by a recent no-vote subsidy. In the absence of a public vote, the PROPSA provides a tool for ascertaining the impact of the public will.
The key function of representative democracy is to provide a mechanism through which public opinion and public policy are regularly connected. On one hand, there should be policy representation; public preferences for policy should be reflected in policy itself. And on the other hand, there should be public responsiveness; public preferences should be informed and should react to public policy. Policy representation is important in everyday politics. Failure of adequate policy representation may result on disaffection of the public for the government. This article discusses the evidence of representation of public preferences in the Canadian federal policy. It discusses the substance of the preferences and determines whether these preferences adjust to the policy itself. The article also discusses thermostatic public responsiveness, whereby public preferences for policy change reflect changes in policy.
Governments in democratic systems are expected to respond to the issue preferences of citizens. Yet we have a limited understanding of the factors that cause levels of responsiveness to vary across time and between countries. In this article, the authors suggest that political contestation is the primary mechanism driving policy responsiveness and that this, in turn, is mediated by political institutions and government popularity. To test this proposition, the authors analyze the responsiveness of executive policy promises (speeches) and policy actions (public expenditure) in Britain, Denmark, and the United States in the period from 1970 to 2005. These time-series analyses show that higher levels of political contestation are associated with more responsive executives.
Do political parties respond to shifts in the preferences of their supporters, which we label the partisan constituency model, or to shifts in the mean voter position (the general electorate model)? Cross-national analyses — based on observations from Eurobarometer surveys and parties’ policy programmes in 15 countries from 1973 to 2002 — suggest that the general electorate model characterizes the policy shifts of mainstream parties. Alternatively, when we analyse the policy shifts of Communist, Green and extreme Nationalist parties (i.e. ‘niche’ parties), we find that these parties respond to shifts in the mean position of their supporters. The findings have implications for spatial theories and political representation.
We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We "export" the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our "language-blind" word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.
This paper summarizes how the partisan influence literature assesses the relationship between the left-right party composition of government and policy outputs through a meta-analysis of 693 parameter estimates of the party-policy relationship published in 43 empirical studies. Based on a simplified `combined tests' meta-analytic technique, we show that the average correlation between the party composition of government and policy outputs is not significantly different from zero. A mutivariate logistic regression analysis examines how support for partisan theory is affected by a subset of mediating factors that can be applied to all the estimates under review. The analysis demonstrates that there are clearly identifiable conditions under which the probability of support for partisan theory can be substantially increased. We conclude that further research is needed on institutional and socio-economic determinants of public policy.
We propose a measure of voter ideology which combines party manifesto data compiled by Budge, Robertson, Heari, Klingemann, and Volkens (1992) and updated by Volkens (1995), with election return data. Assuming the comparability and relevance of left- right ideology, we estimate the median voter position in 15 Western democracies throughout most of the postwar period. The plausibility of our assumptions, and therefore the validity of our measure, is supported by the results of several validity tests. With this new measure we are able to make cross-national comparisons of voter ideology among these countries as well as cross- time comparisons within individual countries. We discuss the potential application of our measure to various debates in political science.
At the beginning of each Parliamentary session, almost all European governments give a speech in which they present the government’s policy goals and legislative agenda for the year to come. Despite the enormous body of literature on governments in European parliamentary democracies, systematic work on these executive policy agendas is surprisingly limited. In this paper we compare the evolvement of executive policy agendas - measured through the annual government speeches in four West European countries, UK, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark over the past 50 years. We find that government policy agendas on the one hand are relatively stable on a year to year basis, On the other hand, when looking at the long-term development, government policy agendas do show significant patterns of change, which furthermore looks remarkably similar across the four countries despite the differences in the four countries’ political institutional structure. Hence, over the long run, executive policy agendas do change substantially, but contrary to election-based explanations of policy change, elections are not the main driver of change. Instead, the results are consistent with a more general model of issue intrusion
The book proposes a unifying conception which shows that the differences between 'majoritarian', 'consensus' and other forms of representative democracy are superficial compared to what unites them. The common element is the empowerment of the median voter by making the party (s)he votes for the median party in the legislature. Comparative evidene covering 21 democracies from 1950-1995 is assembled to check out the descriptive credentials of this idea, in contrast to the government mandate which forms the normal description and justification of democracy as providing 'a necessary link between popular preferences and public policy'. Although, spontaneous majorities rarely emerge, median voter - median party correspondences do (72% of all governments, 82% under PR). Policy correspondence, distortion, long term bias, and responsiveness are examined in both static and dynamic terms. They reveal that underneath short-term fluctuations, the long-term equilibrium positions of governments and median voters map each other closely. Many other questions about democracy are also raised and investigated - economic and retrospective voting (' kicking the rascals out'): policy incrementalism, etc. - giving the book an appeal to different groups of specialists in political science. The comparative data on voting, on electoral party and government preferences, and on actual policy outputs are unsurpassed with regards to comprehensiveness over nations and time.
This venture into democratic theory offers a new and reinvigorating thesis on how democracy delivers on its promise of public control over public policy. In theory, popular control could be achieved through a process entirely driven by supply-side politics, with omniscient and strategic political parties converging on the median voter's policy preference at every turn. However, this would imply that there would be no distinguishable political parties (or even any reason for parties to exist) and no choice for a public to make. The more realistic view taken here portrays democracy as an ongoing series of give and take between political parties' policy supply and a mass public's policy demand. Political parties organize democratic choices as divergent policy alternatives, none of which is likely to satisfy the public's policy preferences at any one turn. While the one-off, short-run consequence of a single election often results in differences between the policies that parliaments and governments pursue and the preferences their publics hold, the authors construct theoretical arguments, employ computer simulations, and follow up with empirical analysis to show how, why, and under what conditions policy agreement emerges over time. Democracy, viewed as a process rather than a single electoral event, can and usually does forge strong and congruent linkages between a public and its government. This original thesis offers a challenge to pessimists who believe that neither political parties nor mass publics are up to the tasks that democracy assigns them. © Ian Budge, Michael D. McDonald, Paul Pennings, and Hans Keman 2012. All rights reserved.
Election pledges are made on important issues and on the policy themes parties emphasize most. Pledges made by parties that enter the government after elections are more likely to be enacted than those made by parties that do not. Substantial differences in rates of pledge enactment can be found among majoritarian, coalition, and bicameral systems. New evidence on elections in Ireland, where coalition governments are common, is compared with the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., Canada, and Greece. Ireland and the Netherlands are crucial cases for theories of cabinet governance that feature the coalition agreement and the allocation of ministerial portfolios.
A large number of studies of ideological congruence, and of the effect of public opinion on policy outcomes more generally, have relied on the Kim-Fording (KF) measure of median voter opinion. This measure has the great virtue of being readily calculable – no direct measurement of voter opinion is required – but it rests on assumptions concerning party locations and voter behaviour that are unquestionably incorrect, at least some of the time. This article explores the sensitivity of the KF measure to violations of its core assumptions through simulation experiments. It then uses public opinion data to assess the degree to which consequential levels of violation occur in actual democratic systems. The article concludes with a discussion of what the KF median really measures and where it can – and cannot – be safely used.
If public opinion changes and then public policy responds, this is dynamic representation. Public opinion is the global policy preference of the American electorate. Policy is a diverse set of acts of elected and unelected officials. Two mechanisms of policy responsiveness are (1) elections change the government's political composition, which is then reflected in new policy and (2) policymakers calculate future (mainly electoral) implications of current public views and act accordingly (rational anticipation). We develop multiple indicators of policy activity for the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, then model policy liberalism as a joint function of the two mechanisms. For each institution separately, and also in a global analysis of “government as a whole,” we find that policy responds dynamically to public opinion change. This responsiveness varies by institution, both in level and in mechanism, as would be expected from constitutional design.
The relationship between median citizen opinion on the left–right dimension, as measured in the Eurobarometer and European Electoral Studies series of surveys, and the left–right positions of governments in West European democracies is explored to gain a fuller understanding of how and to what extent median opinion may influence what governments subsequently set out to do. The analysis allows for the possibility that measurement may not be equivalent across countries and surveys, that the data may contain significant dynamic effects, and that different countries may exhibit different relationships between the two variables. The analyses show that changes in the citizen median generally produce larger changes in government position, the size depending mainly on the proportionality of the electoral system.
Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between public priorities and the policy activities of government, undertaking time‐series analyses using data for the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1951 to 2003, relating to executive speeches, laws and budgets in combination with data on public opinion about the ‘most important problem’. The results show that the responsiveness of policy agendas to public priorities is greater when institutions are subject to less friction (i.e., executive speeches subject to few formal rules and involving a limited number of actors) and declines as friction against policy change increases (i.e., laws and budgets subject to a greater number of veto points and political interests/coalitions).
Amelia II is a complete R package for multiple imputation of missing data. The package implements a new expectation-maximization with bootstrapping algorithm that works faster, with larger numbers of variables, and is far easier to use, than various Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, but gives essentially the same answers. The program also improves imputation models by allowing researchers to put Bayesian priors on individual cell values, thereby including a great deal of potentially valuable and extensive information. It also includes features to accurately impute cross-sectional datasets, individual time series, or sets of time series for different cross-sections. A full set of graphical diagnostics are also available. The program is easy to use, and the simplicity of the algorithm makes it far more robust; both a simple command line and extensive graphical user interface are included.
Elections are the defining institution of democracy, in the sense of directly linking popular preferences to public policy. Which programme gets chosen depends on the outcome of the election. However, voters' choices are very much constrained by the policy packages parties put forward in the first place. In most representative elections, no alternatives can be voted on apart from those advocated by established parties, who thus play a role almost equal to electors in defining the election outcome. This article examines the policy choices offered by parties in their published programmes over 17 post-war democracies - uncovering a wide variety of patterns with only limited links to type of election system or number of parties. Voters always have a choice, though in some countries it is more limited and less nuanced than in others.
In this updated and expanded edition of his classic text, Arend Lijphart offers a broader and deeper analysis of worldwide democratic institutions than ever before. Examining thirty-six democracies during the period from 1945 to 2010, Lijphart arrives at important-and unexpected-conclusions about what type of democracy works best. Praise for the previous edition: "Magnificent...The best-researched book on democracy in the world today."-Malcolm Mackerras, American Review of Politics "I can't think of another scholar as well qualified as Lijphart to write a book of this kind. He has an amazing grasp of the relevant literature, and he's compiled an unmatched collection of data."-Robert A. Dahl, Yale University "This sound comparative research ...will continue to be a standard in graduate and undergraduate courses in comparative politics."-Choice
Geoffrey Garrett challenges the conventional wisdom about the domestic effects of the globalization of markets in the industrial democracies: the erosion of national autonomy and the demise of leftist alternatives to the free market. He demonstrates that globalization has strengthened the relationship between the political power of the left and organized labour and economic policies that reduce market-generated inequalities of risk and wealth. Moreover, macroeconomic outcomes in the era of global markets have been as good or better in strong left-labour regimes ('social democratic corporatism') as in other industrial countries. Pessimistic visions of the inexorable dominance of capital over labour or radical autarkic and nationalist backlashes against markets are significantly overstated. Electoral politics have not been dwarfed by market dynamics as social forces. Globalized markets have not rendered immutable the efficiency-equality trade-off.
This book develops and tests a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy, in which preferences for policy both drive and adjust to changes in policy. The representation of opinion in policy is central to democratic theory and everyday politics. So too is the extent to which public preferences are informed and responsive to changes in policy. The coexistence of both “public responsiveness” and “policy representation” is thus a defining characteristic of successful democratic governance, and the subject of this book. The authors examine both responsiveness and representation across a range of policy domains in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The story that emerges is one in which representative democratic government functions surprisingly well, though there are important differences in the details. Variations in public responsiveness and policy representation responsiveness are found to reflect the “salience” of the different domains and governing institutions – specifically, presidentialism (versus parliamentarism) and federalism (versus unitary government).
A perennial question for students of democracy is the extent to which government policies align with voter preferences. This is often studied by comparing median voter opinion on a left-right scale with the cabinet weighted mean, that is, the mean left-right position of cabinet parties, weighted by their legislative sizes. Government positions may also be estimated from their declarations, however. In a recent investigation, McDonald and Budge found that declared government policy better accords with the voter median than with the cabinet weighted mean, a finding they interpreted as consistent with their hypothesis that actual government policy tends to reflect a "median mandate." This investigation retests the McDonald-Budge model using a time-series cross-section methodology and an expanded data set. It finds no support for a median mandate interpretation but strong evidence that declared government positions respond to the positions of cabinet parties and, where present, external support parties. It also reveals a tendency for declared positions to be shifted to the right of the cabinet mean, a tendency that increases with the length of time that has elapsed since the last election (particularly for left-wing governments). This evidence that the policies governments set out to implement are systematically "right shifted" bears major consequences for our understanding of representative democracy.
Some scholars use the ‘dynamic representation’ approach to test how much current policy changes reflect past public preferences. This article tests hypotheses derived from this approach in a left–right context for the United Kingdom from 1976 to 2006. This shows that government policy on the left–right scale shifts as public preferences change (‘rational anticipation’). Secondly, a public with right-wing preferences elects the Conservatives, who pursue right-wing policies in office (‘electoral turnover’). However, popular incumbents are less likely to adjust their policy position to the public. The Westminster system is criticized for its weak link between the rulers and the ruled, but dynamic representation on the left–right scale in the United Kingdom seems to have functioned admirably in this period.
In this article, we put forward a continuous measure of government partisanship, which allows meaningful comparisons across countries and across time, for 17 Western democracies for the period of 1945 through 1998. Our measure is predicated upon a manifesto-based measure of party ideology recently developed by Kim and Fording (1998), along with yearly cabinet post data. After discussing the validity of our measure, we repli-cate one of the most cited works in comparative political economy over the last ten years – Alvarez, Garrett and Lange's (1991) analysis of economic performance – by utilizing our own measure of government partisanship. We conclude that comparativists need to exercise greater caution in interpreting and evaluating the past findings of a large number of multi-variate studies in comparative politics.
Public policy is supposed under democracy to be necessarily linked to popular preferences through elections. Election outcomes are however shaped not only by the votes cast but also by the party-policy options on offer and the rules by which votes are aggregated into seats. A crucial question is whether rules exert their influence through the party system they help shape or whether public policy is directly affected by them. We examine these points here over the post-war period with evidence on policy preferences at electoral and governmental levels in 21 countries. Under single member constituency systems (SMD), election rules and party systems have independent and equal effects on short run representation, while under PR it is the party systems which produce (limited) distortion. Over time however SMD itself emerges as the main source of representational bias in the countries where it operates, with little bias under PR from either election or party systems.
In a recent article in the American Political Science Review, Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, “Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data,” 97:311-331) propose a new method for conducting content analysis. Their Wordscores approach, by automating text-coding procedures, represents an advance in content analysis that will potentially have a large long-term impact on research across the discipline. To allow substantive interpretation, the scores produced by the Wordscores procedure require transformation. In this note, we address several shortcomings in the transformation procedure introduced in the original program. We demonstrate that the original transformation distorts the metric on which content scores are placed-hindering the ability of scholars to make meaningful comparisons across texts-and that it is very sensitive to the texts that are scored-opening up the possibility that researchers may generate, inadvertently or not, results that depend on the texts they choose to include in their analyses. We propose a transformation procedure that solves these problems.
Wordscores is a widely used procedure for inferring policy positions, or scores, for new documents on the basis of scores
for words derived from documents with known scores. It is computationally straightforward, requires no distributional assumptions,
but has unresolved practical and theoretical problems. In applications, estimated document scores are on the wrong scale and
the theoretical development does not specify a statistical model, so it is unclear what assumptions the method makes about
political text and how to tell whether they fit particular text analysis applications. The first part of the paper demonstrates
that badly scaled document score estimates reflect deeper problems with the method. The second part shows how to understand
Wordscores as an approximation to correspondence analysis which itself approximates a statistical ideal point model for words.
Problems with the method are identified with the conditions under which these layers of approximation fail to ensure consistent
and unbiased estimation of the parameters of the ideal point model.
Michael McDonald and Ian Budge have recently advanced an interpretation of democratic governance based on what they term the ‘median mandate’. This perspective locates the key element of liberal democracy in a close correspondence between government policy and the policy preferences of the median voter on the left-right scale. The cross-national evidence they produce in favour of this interpretation is impressive, but it largely hinges on a method for measuring the median voter position in each election that relies on the positions of the various parties in the election and the vote shares they received. This article examines the validity of the median mandate hypothesis when median positions are measured more directly from public opinion surveys (particularly, the Eurobarometer and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems series). The findings show that choice between distinct alternatives, rather than conformity to the median, more accurately characterises governance in democratic systems.
The left–right scheme is the most widely used and parsimonious representation of political competition. Yet, long time series of the left–right position of governments are sparse. Existing methods are of limited use in dynamic settings due to insufficient time points which hinders the proper specification of time-series regressions. This article analyses legislative speeches in order to construct an annual left–right policy variable for Britain from 1956 to 2006. Using a recently developed content analysis tool, known as Wordscores, it is shown that speeches yield valid and reliable estimates for the left–right position of British government policy. Long time series such as the one proposed in this article are vital to building dynamic macro-level models of politics. This measure is cross-validated with four independent sources: (1) it compares well to expert surveys; (2) a rightward trend is found in post-war British government policy; (3) Conservative governments are found to be more right wing in their policy outputs than Labour governments; (4) conventional accounts of British post-war politics support the pattern of government policy movement on the left–right scale.
The ability of a political system to respond to the preferences of its citizens is central to democra- tic theory and practice; yet most empirical research on government responsiveness has concen- trated on the United States. As a result, we know very little about the nature of government policy responsiveness in Europe and we have a poor understanding of the conditions that affect cross- national variations. This comparative study examines the relationship between public opinion and policy preferences in the United Kingdom and Denmark during the past three decades. We address two key questions: First, are the government's policy intentions driven by public opinion or vice versa? Second, do political institutions influence the level of government responsiveness? We suggest that public opinion tends to drive the government's policy intentions due to the threat of electoral sanction, and that this is more pronounced in proportional systems than in majoritarian democracies. In this comparative study of government policy responsiveness in Britain and Denmark, we examine whether the results generated by previous research are robust when tested in a longitudinal cross-national design. Moreover, our choice of cases enables us to assess how differences in institutional set-up affect the level of policy responsiveness. We thus address two key questions: first, are the gov- ernment's policy intentions driven by the public's attitudes towards political issues
Inheritance in public policy: Change without choice in Britain
- R. Rose
- P. Davies
Mapping policy preferences II: Estimates for parties, electors and governments in Eastern Europe, the EU and the OECD, 1990–2003
- H.-D. Klingemann
The Manifesto data collection: Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR)
- A Volkens
Left-right party ideology and government policies: A meta-analysis
- Imbeau
The Mannheim Eurobarometer trend file
- H Schmitt
- E Scholz